I guess the Left has moved towards me, then. Bill Maher is now claiming that, because right-wing Fox News has said the Democrats ought to make Maher a presidential candidate (I’m sure his bloated ego loved that), the Left has left him. So on a recent show he defended that endorsement from right-wing loonies by trying to argue that no, the Democrats are the loony ones. Yeah, right, our center-right political party is far crazier than the party that has embraced the anti-democracy racist misogynist position. He trots out a series of headlines from the Wall Street Journal and Forbes to prove that Democrats lack all common sense. It’s painful to listen to, especially since he has an audience that whoops and hollers to every stupid point he makes.
The solution: watch it with Dusty Smith who pauses it to take apart his every claim.
Man, Maher has always been every well-off white guy who thinks its funny when someone questions his sense of entitlement. I never cared much for him, and even disliked his atheist movie, Religulous.
Interesting. After posting this, I did my usual morning cleanup of the comments section, and what do I find? Our chronic homophobic/transphobic/misogynistic/antisemitic bigoted troll had erupted overnight, dumping 52 comments in various places, all totally uncreative, repetitive garbage accusing people of being gay. Everything from “seanbf” has been cleaned up now, but the curious thing is…he was inspired by Bill Maher. He kept citing that Maher segment above, declaring that Maher was correct, he loved Bill Maher. Good company.
As a comedy-business decision, Bill Maher’s rightward swerve makes at least a tiny bit of sense: Republicans have become such an obvious self-parody that making fun of them no longer works, and all the jokes we tell about them, while spot-on and totally appropriate, are simply old and predictable. Mockery is most effective when you’re mocking someone who cares whether he’s being mocked, and Republicans are shielded by many layers of not-caring. So Maher is now giving up on them and settling on easier targets. Which is the comedy version of what Republicans do in all seriousness, which is bullying more vulnerable people because they’re afraid to take on anyone bigger.
Wait a second! Isn’t “he trots out a series of headlines from the Wall Street Journal” pretty much the same as Fox? WSJ is News Corp, i.e. Rupert Murdoch. And as for Forbes magazine, it doesn’t take long to discover that the Forbes family is deeply embedded in Republican politics. So I would put anything that WSJ or Forbes says about Democrats in the same BS bucket as any propaganda.
Sadly, tho, I have friends that I think listen to Bill Maher. I keep hoping they mean Bill Moyer, a more palpable voice, because the names are so similar.
Democrats, or Progressives, or whatever you want to call them, do have a problem. When they say “Math is racist” or “Science is racist” or “Defund the police”, they have a problem even with liberal voters like me. As Maher says, if what you’re doing sounds like a headline from The Onion, you should stop doing it.
I don’t know, I’d be a bit uneasy to be the new rightwing media darling.
Nice!
“Where are your fact-checkers at? Don’t you have writers that research anything you say? I’m goddamn one person sitting in my fucking bed with a budget of zero that does more research than you do on HBO.”
I have to say, Maher’s whole section about regulations and cars at the end was appalling.
@3: Yes, but, as Dusty points out, “they” aren’t really saying ANY of those things.
I was never a fan. When was he cool? I first noticed him in connection to his then new show “Politically Incorrect.” That was 1993 (checked). I had seen enough of campus conservatives whining about supposed “speech codes” to know what a crock it was. How “brave” of him to get paid to attack an imaginary dragon on weekly basis. Though it didn’t turn me into a fan, I appreciated his point that the 9/11 terrorists were obviously not cowards (despite their clear moral failings) and the nationalist tizzy that resulted. Ironically, it was probably the first thing he uttered that was “politically incorrect” and he paid a price.
robro@2 Yes, Bill Moyers is a brilliant journalist and a good man. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. Where did all the thoughtful middle Americans go?
I’m sorry, but WHO is claiming that math and science are racist? I mean, I’m sure that what right-wing shit stains like Shapiro, Peterson, and Maher claim the left believe that, but we’re going to need more than just your probably uninformed assertion.
FTFY… I’m sorry that black and brown people didn’t clear the slogan with white liberalism’s PR department.
EDIT: That was directed toward #3.
@tallgrass05
“When they say “Math is racist” or “Science is racist” or “Defund the police”, they have a problem even with liberal voters like me. ”
When have they said those things? The only one of those points that has ever been a progressive position is defunding the police, which was never a popular mainstream progressive position (although it should be).
The other two slogans are deliberate misunderstandings of progressive positions, reduced to slogan form for the hard of thinking. Where do you get your news if you genuinely believe that they say “math is racist”? Certainly not from any progressive, or even honest, news source.
Definitely not from any Democratic leaders. They’re all tediously centrist and in favor of the status quo.
PaulBC — “Yes, Bill Moyers is a brilliant journalist and a good man. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. Where did all the thoughtful middle Americans go?” Indeed. His series on the Vietnam War some years after the war convinced my father, finally, that it was a big mistake. There is another one: Heather Cox Richardson who I discovered through Moyer’s website.
It’s been a while, but I have heard the odd fringe individual say things like math or science is patriarchal or whatever. These seem to be hold outs from the ’70’s still hallucinating to the metaphysics of con artist Carlos Castaneda.
The leap from someone pointing out the social constructs of science, for instance, to someone else thinking that means that there’s no objective reality is a short step. So if you look hard enough you will always be able to dig up somebody saying just about anything weird you can imagine. I wouldn’t use them as examples of how progressives think by and large.
OTOH, “defund the police” is a foolishly constructed ear worm that thankfully seems to have run its course.
… his atheist movie, Religulous.
Which had a few good zingers – but Maher went awfully easy on the glaring issues connected to the two religions he has a family connection with, Judaism and Catholicism.
From what little I ever saw from Bill Maher, he shares Jon Stewart’s worst tendencies to mug for the camera, as well as having significantly worse politics (and Stewart is as imperfect a pargaon on that front as he is on the comedy front). So I was never a fan either, since back in the 2000s I was watching a better version of a show filling the same ecological niche.
I just linked to this new NBC report “Banned: Books on race and sexuality are disappearing from Texas schools in record numbers” on the Infinite Thread. A while back, I linked to a PEN report on educational gag orders.
It’s important to recognize the difference between these and things like Maher’s set and the slew of bullshit moral-panic pieces about “leftwing cancel culture.” The articles and reports on rightwing censorship and book-banning efforts on the right are grounded in data, and discuss organized political and legal efforts. They use particular local instances, anecdotes, and interviews to provide color, context, and different viewpoints. In contrast, the pieces scaremongering about so-called cancel culture are built entirely on a foundation of scattered anecdotes that almost always turn out to be distorted, exaggerated, oversimplified, and decontextualized.
You’re Wrong About has two especially good episodes on the latter:
“Political Correctness.”
“Cancel Culture.”:
Michael Hobbes debunks these pieces daily on Twitter, but the writers generally ignore it and continue spouting this nonsense. As Smith notes in the video, this is rightwing propaganda promoted by rightwing media for their political-economic purposes. Maher is just the latest rightwing hack.
(Warning: long soapbox ahead. Please skip if you like. I write these things to clarify them in my own head.)
“Defund the police” is an actual slogan. “Math [or science] is racist” is not. It’s either ignorant or disingenuous to lump these together. I have heard claims that standardized tests are biased, and there’s some plausibility. Math as such is clearly neutral, as many cultures around the world have been able to agree on a standard notation and use it effectively. It is also not “Western.” Europe had a lot of catching up to do some centuries back. Teaching of math certainly is biased, and you aren’t going to do as well on the SAT math section if you went to a poorly funded public school or were taught by teachers whose implicit bias led them to teach some students to lower standards. “Science” is a broad category, and some of things that have been identified as science in the past are explicitly racist, such as eugenics. Mostly, I would say it should be racially neutral but may not be taught that way. Again, the most racist element is the implicit bias that encourages whites and “model minorities” to pursue STEM while discouraging disadvantaged minorities.
Back to the one that is an actual slogan. I am liberal and a lifelong Democratic voter. I don’t really identify as leftwing. I would settle for the most leftwing government that’s electable in the US, which is much further left than what we have now, but still probably a lot closer to center than many self-identified progressives assume.
While I sympathize with the slogan “defund the police”, it seems literally incorrect to me. I agree with “demilitarize the police” (which would be a huge change) and “deracialize policing.” Personally, I think any police office who fires a weapon on the job should just be consigned to a deskjob for the rest of their career if it was justified and fired and imprisoned if it wasn’t. Why is that hard? Yes, you should be able to save your life in a dangerous profession, but it shouldn’t be a routine part of your job. But literally defund? No, I mean there are definitely still criminals out there. Simply eliminating law enforcement sounds like a terrible idea.
That aside, I still have to vote for whatever candidates are available. Is fucking immature to say “I don’t like your words so I’m going to vote for a monster just to teach you a lesson.” I also don’t think that finding the right incantation of slogans is going to bring voters back into the fold. The ability to enact effective policy will. (And no I am not holding my breath for that either.)
I did some superficial searching about
math is racist, and found many hits. Filtering out the nonsense (e.g., “Arabic numerals” is “cultural appropriation” and so on), the more sensible observations — that I noticed in my superficial searching — seem to centre on two points (in no particular order): First, maths is used in the promotion of racist garbage (e.g., The Bell Curve); and Second, the teaching of maths can seem to be racist (e.g., exercise problems largely involve European cultures and peoples, etc.).Both of those points are potentially valid, but neither means maths itself is somehow racist.
Then you literally don’t understand the word. “Defund education” is a phrase used to describe the relentless reduction of resources to public universities, secondary schools, and primary schools. Yet we still have those things.
“Defund” is not the same as “eliminate”. It is only right wing idiots spreading this idea that has made it possible for people to suddenly dramatically interpret “defund” differently in this context than they have in the context of education for the last 30 years.
CD@18 The first (and I’m going to say “literal” definition) of defund I can find is “prevent from continuing to receive funds”. Obviously, this has not been done to education, which continues to receive (albeit diminished) funding. The rightwing call years back to “defund the NEA” was certainly intended as eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, not merely to reduce its funding.
Yes, I know words have multiple meanings, and usually I won’t go for the dictionary retort, but in this case, “defund” certainly can mean “remove all funding.” It’s not a stretch.
The slogan “Defund the Police” probably does mean something I agree with, but when I say I am against it in its literal form, I mean it. If you need a footnote that “defund” means “reduce funding” then maybe you ought to say that. (Note that you could remove funding for police without eliminating them, but I don’t think anyone means that.) It’s not (in my opinion) a great slogan. It doesn’t really affect my voting. I think I know what it means. I just understand why it bothers some people.
By contrast “Black Lives Matters” is a great slogan, means exactly what it says, literally, and the people who bristle at it are certainly unrepentant racists unless they really have serious problems with reading comprehension.
There’s literally a “Defund the Police” Wikipedia page.
…as a addendum to me@19, the last time I remember commenting here that I agree with “defund” in the sense of things like removing funding for military equipment, but “obviously” (I thought) it can’t really mean remove all funding, I got some pushback on that.
So I give up on exactly what it means. There are certainly many neighborhoods with people of color who would like competent police who are there to protect their lives and property, as they are assumed to do for white neighborhoods. Sometimes their complaint is that police aren’t there for them. My take-away is that probably some elements of policing such as community outreach and training ought to be better funded. Some elements should be eliminated entirely, such as military equipment, and putting police in dangerous situations where they don’t belong, such as using a “broken taillight” as a fishing expedition for other violations when actual broken taillights can be ticketed by mail, thus avoiding an armed police encounter and protecting everyone’s lives (including the cop).
It’s unclear to me whether my vision of a police department dedicated to enforcing the law fairly for all Americans would cost more or less money than the current one. My hunch is it would cost less, but an international comparison would help. Clearly our prison system could be cheaper if we didn’t incarcerate more people than any other comparable nation. Still, “reform” rather than “defund” seems the salient point here.
If my list of potential police reforms is summarized as “defund the police” that would be quite interesting, but it is hard for me to see how that’s the case.
SC@20 So is it an effective slogan if its semantics depend on a link to information about a larger movement? Wouldn’t it be more effective if the words actually meant what they sound like to most native English speakers?
The fact that you “literally” need to research what it means still supports my claim that the literal meaning is inadequate, which is in fact all I said.
In practice, the issue is whether it does more harm or good in achieving the goals of the movement. I think initially it did a great deal of good as a rallying cry. Empirically speaking, I’m not sure it does as much good on a longterm basis since it invites misinterpretation. I guess time will tell.
@18 CD,RRFFtoD&HH
Fair point, but “defund the police” was put out in the context of a milieu where some people were loudly saying that the police should be abolished. Context.
The right would probably be perfectly happy to defund government involvement in education out of existence, as in shrink it down to where it can be drowned in a bathtub.
Admittedly it’s not easy task to craft a bulletproof slogan, especially these days. But “Black Lives Matter” I’d say is pretty good in that it’s easier to explain and more of a stretch to attack.
PaulBC, you’re on a commenting jag and I’m not interested in furthering that. I said nothing about the slogan, its meaning(s), or its usefulness. Just pointed people to a resource.
Bill Maher sucks.
“Maher has always been every [sic] well-off white guy who thinks its funny when someone questions his sense of entitlement.”
PZ, genuinely, why refer to Maher’s race here?
I’ve never liked the phrase Defund the Police. I question using a word in a way that it is not universally defined in trying to make a nuanced argument. And to Americans no less.
I question people who complain about “defund the police” from all sides. They are reacting to a slogan and if they can’t talk about a specific piece of legislation I tell them so, and they display their oversensitivity when they can’t.
It was also put out in a context where the Minneapolis City Council was specifically entertaining proposals to reduce police funding by transferring that same funding over to other professionals to handle problems like, e.g., homeless persons considered to be (or actually being) a nuisance and/or people in a mental health crisis. Cops have been shown to be a terrible resource to use in response to homelessness and mental illness, and the place where “Defund the police” was made famous was a place where this was the specific political conversation. Why are the very real issues actually being debated in the location where George Floyd was murdered and the political debate referenced first received national attention of less import than the fact that some unnamed someone said some stupid shit that one time?
I don’t know how many people are loudly saying that policing should be abolished, but I bet for fucking certain that they weren’t elected Democrats. As a result, the extent to which “abolish the police” is important context is the extent to which you think that Fox News’ lies about its political opponents are important context.
So, yeah. Actual context.
Further, I actually think it’s a good thing if some people loudly agitate for an end to all policing. For one thing it forces the political allies of policing as currently conducted to put forth a “Can’t we all agree X is necessary?” vision of the police, which necessarily does NOT include militarization of the police, no-knock warrants, etc.
Second, whether as a result of the first or just more generally in conversation, “Abolish the police,” shifts the Overton window so that elected democrats can talk about dispatching mental health care professionals to deal with mental health crises without looking like soft-on-crime lunatics.
The thing is that even IF “defund the police” is misinterpreted to mean “abolish all policing”, it’s not actually bad that that message get into the public arena. Policing, if it is to exist and receive funds from our common taxes, should have to continually justify itself. Just as the US Military must justify itself through pointing at a combination of plausible threats that can manifest over a time frame that would require immediately beginning acquisition and/or training to mitigate the threat (otherwise such activity could be put off until beginning those processes was a security requirement), policing must justify itself. If policing is never asked to justify itself, we inevitably end up with not merely an unquestioned institution, but an unquestionable, unaccountable institution: exactly what we have now.
In that sense, “defund the police” like “abolish all policing” is a slogan which achieves something important in the public sphere. Every time we discuss the phrases here we provide proof of their capacity to create conversation and encourage reflection.
Whether you believe, as I do, that the right wing media has unjustifiably attributed the statements and sentiments of a few activists to actual political opponents, including the Democratic party writ large, the actual context here demonstrates that we who do not use “defund the police” actually owe a debt to we who do.
Crip Dyke @28 is full of excellent and important points.
The Overton window factor in particular is something the left (and moderate liberals) all too often overlook, to perpetual disadvantage.
I think the real problem with “Defund the Police” isn’t the messaging strategy, or even anything to do with the movement itself. Rather it’s the simple fact that waaay to many “moderate liberals” were/are simply not onboard with reducing the size or power of the carceral police state and would have been ready to strawman, belittle, or scapegoat the concept no matter what it was called.
That said, if anyone happens to be making an appearance as a pundit on a Sunday talking head political and wants an easier to stomach slogan, “Unburden the Police” always sounded good to me. I.e., unburden the police of being primary responders to mental health crises, of being social workers, career counselors, etc. It’s hard for even cops themselves to object to that, because AFAICT, even they mostly understand that they’re not well trained for those situations, and would rather not be continually forced to handle them by default.
Or if folks want a phrase to criticize that is genuinely bad, let’s pile on the abjectly awful concept of “law enforcement” instead. I think you can draw a direct line between American police adopting that as their self image, and such problems as thinking that it’s better to wait for a crime to occur (so you can throw a “bad guy” in jail) rather than, say, preventing it from occurring in the first place. (Or otherwise helping people and doing what is best for the community, rather than “enforcing”.)
To be honest, I think a lot of people just liked his riffs on religion and just saw the left-of-center political views to be an added bonus. That said, his true nature was already revealing itself during the Obama years.
He was only supportive of science when it conflicted with creationists. In other instances, he was just as anti-science as any creationist ever was. He believed vaccines were unnecessary if only people “stopped eating shit.” His views on race were paternalistic to say the least but he used the guise of being “non-politically correct liberal” as pass to say what he wanted, until he was checked by Ice Cube that is.
He has just embraced what he been all along. I really don’t think anyone was fooled. People just tolerated him
The funny thing to me here is that Fox News wasn’t simply trying to be facetious, they were actually calling Bill Maher out as an utter and complete clown. Of course they want him to run for the Democrats because such a move would make even the most ridiculous of Republican candidates a shew-in in any election. But instead of seeing this as an utter attack on his character, Maher seemed to revel in it as if the idea was intended as flattery. Can he really get any more self-absorbed? (Probably, but God what an arrogant maroon!)
BTW, I never found Maher very liberal at all. He simply made fun of the right wing a lot, and they were the ones who labeled him as a liberal. Maher has always claimed to be a Libertarian, always acted like one — albeit a rather shallow and dumb one at that (and that’s saying quite a bit given how shallow and dumb Libertarian politics have become over the last few decades), and as with all of his most ridiculous tirades — such as this one on display here — he demonstrates, again and again, that he is still a total Libertarian.
Despite his belief that he is the unchanging center to the political galaxy, I still reluctantly agree with him when he claims he hasn’t changed all that much — he is still the same infantile, shallow, self-absorbed Libertarian he has always been. But he is wrong to say the left has been the one whose changed. The only thing that has really significantly changed in twenty years is Maher himself has become far more honest and open with his audience about what a narcissistic kook he really is (and has apparently always been), Now that its finally come to light over the past 20 years on the air, he’s finding himself more appealing to the right (during a time when conservatives have utterly fallen off the cliff of insanity, I might add) and far less so to the left (that has slowly drifted toward a more centrist view of politics). This is simply what happens when lunatic morons finally, and proudly, come out of the closet. Its really should be no surprise at all.
I think Jack Lecou has the best criticism of “defund the police” with the paragraph:
I’m still happy that some people will use it at least some of the time for reasons expressed earlier, but if you’re going to criticize its use, this is the most cogent and powerful criticism I’ve seen.
I would not trust anyone who relies on Forbes, of all publications.
It is a long time since Maher dared criticize the post-9/11 propaganda frenzy.
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Taking apart BS – Wednesday Boris will have to answer to questions from the leaders of the opposition parties in parliament, and trying to dodge responsibility for the criticism in a recent report. It will be fun watching the old crook.
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Late-night TV hosts might have such a large viewer base since so much of the media landscape is so bland. Not a Merican version of ‘Spitting Image” in sight.
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Dusty Smith took apart Bill Maher.
Almost the same hour the Ayn Rand film monstrosity ‘Atlas Shrugged part 1’ was taken apart by Noah Lugeons, Heath Enwright and Eli Bosnick. I keep nagging about their podcast, because they- and Stephen Colbert- manage to turn extreme-right horrors to comedy.
Maher? More like Meh-er.
Seriously, fuck that guy. He’s not a tool, he’s the whole goddamn tool chest.
Perception is reality, especially to conservatives or GOP voters who lack critical thinking skills. Yes, there have been calls to abolish municipal and university police departments–it does not matter if mainstream Democrats are not saying that, but they still say “defund the police”. Their messaging is all wrong, a much better word than “defund” should be used. Democrats always play defense, never offense. The Build Back Better bill–Democrats should outline each individual component that benefits Americans. All that Joe Average hears is “giant socialistic bill” and the Democrats roll over.
Overstating your case so that you can get what you want while seeming to sacrifice during the compromise process IS playing offense.
Ask for the moon and settle for a new public health, care & safety agency that takes over 40% of 911 calls formerly addressed by the cops. LOOK HOW MUCH WE COMPROMISED!
@33:
To be clear, I’m very happy for people to use it too. The more the better, probably. It moves the window. And eventuallly, we do need to tug “moderate” perceptions of what is possible over to the left a couple of notches. But that is and always has been a long term project.
I’m just saying that the fact that huge police reforms weren’t passed in 2020 isn’t the fault of activists for not picking the right magic words or something. There are no magic words that would have done that.
Bill’s simply positioning himself as the “reasonable liberal”. You can recognize them by their tendency to frame arguments as “insert republican talking point, I agree with insert republican talking point, I have the same problem myself.” Whatever issues I have with the left and it’s inability to frame messages properly, his kind are worse.
Bill also thinks that the term “China Virus” can’t be racist because scientists used to name viruses after where they were discovered and scientists aren’t racist. Yep, let that logic sink in for a bit. Nothing can be racist if it comes from people who have a job Bill Maher doesn’t associate with racists.
There’s a saying going around the center-left that “I don’t like cancel culture, but I really don’t like whiny, millionaire, standup comics that can’t take criticism”. Bill’s the personification of that now, although Dave Chapelle is working hard to take that title from him. He’s turning into an angry old man yelling at clouds.
Drken @ 39
From now on, every story of people like Maher and Chapelle doing this should be accompanied with the panel from The Simpsons showing the newspaper page with Grandpa Simpson.
Also, any story with Tucker Carlson. A French Disney story about a cartoon character makes him become dumber than Alex Jones.
“Pant suites? AAARGHH”
To accomplish meaningful police reform will require a lot more murders performed on camera.
birgerjohansson@34, “I would not trust anyone who relies on Forbes”.
Not to defend Forbes, but their Covid-19 coverage seems sensible for the most part, especially, perhaps, for their (presumed) target audience.
I used to watch Maher’s show because I liked the different guests he had on the show. But after his dumb statements on vaccinations and him going off on preventative things like social distancing and masks, I’ve had enough. It sure seems that Bill cherry picks his science support and criticism. He’s right on climate change but horrible when it comes to the basic science of vaccinations and how they work.
But I see the same crap on this message board about people chiming in about “defund the police.” Once again the right has owned the topic and will shove their culture wars even more up our rear ends. This unfortunate meme is now being used to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement with asinine CRT nonsense, then to banning any talk about racial issues, and now banning books like “Maus” and “To Kill A Mocking Bird.”
We need to #De-fash the police (i.e., take out the fascists). I don’t think that ACAB, but it sure is too many of them.
They* say there are two kinds of people who join the police: Those who want to help, and those who want to dominate. We need to be screening out the second kind, regardless of how much that cuts into recruitment. Seems obvious, but I don’t hear anyone saying it.
“They” = I don’t remember who
Nemo @43: And the people who say ACAB believe that the number of cops who are corrupt are too much of the total number and the ones who aren’t are more interested in protecting their brothers on the force than the public. And as such, the modern American police force is irredeemable and should be completely abolished and replaced by something new that isn’t full of white supremacists.
Not a realistic goal, but as stated above useful for shifting the Overton window.back to the left.
And Maher is a tool. Didn’t really know much about him before Religulous came out, but saw it and decided that it was just as vapid and shallow in its actions as all the creationist movies were so there was no point in treating him like he was anything special.
I still think that “defund the police” sidesteps the issue. I doesnt even pretend to fix the root causes. It just tries to make it smaller. The real fixes involve a fundamental rethink of the scope of police power, eg a drastic reduction in the scope and discretion of police use of force, in the form of published official detailed documents that describe what can and cannot be done, plus real personal accountability for individual cops when the break these rules. Unfortunately, too many people, including some in this thread, still think that the solution lies at better training or better hiring and firing practices. Also, in the broader public, too many people have the authoritarian belief that we need to live in a police state to be safe and they’re not willing to talk about the drastic reductions in discretionary use of force which needs to be done.
For example, overturn Atwater and make olive get actual arrest warrants from judges in most cases to perform arrests. Principal exceptions being personal witness to an ongoing violent offense or offense that “disrupts public order” eg cannot wait until tomorrow, and probable cause of outstanding felony offenses. Most offenses should be resolved by ticket aka summons order to appear for trial, with most arrest warrants for “failure to appear” offenses.
The problem in my mind is that this cannot happen as long as most people believe we need a standing army, aka the police, with wideranging discretionary use of force power to protect us from criminals.
Excellent video deconstruction by Dudty Smith, cheers and subscribed.
@15. SC (Salty Current) : Dunno how many peopel may already have seen it but :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/kriswager/2022/01/30/banning-maus/
Which is rather disturbing.
Anyone else read & impressed by Nat Hentoff’s ‘The Day They Came to ban the Book?.
https://www.supersummary.com/the-day-they-came-to-arrest-the-book/summary/
On the fictional censorship of Huckleberry Finn? One Ireally enjoyed reading albeit many years ago and would recommend.
@20. SC (Salty Current) : “There’s literally a “Defund the Police” Wikipedia page.”
Here if folks would like the link :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police
FWIW, ‘Reform the police’ seems like a better slogan to me but then as a white Aussie its not my jurisdiction to decide and I do see their intnet and meaning by that defund word.
I still think that “defund the police” sidesteps the issue. I doesnt even pretend to fix the root causes.
Dude, it’s a slogan, not a policy. As others have already said, the point is to take initiative and shift the debate — and THAT will bring us at least a little closer to fixing root causes.
Unfortunately, too many people, including some in this thread, still think that the solution lies at better training or better hiring and firing practices.
Well, yeah, both of those would be PART of “THE solution.” I heard somewhere that cops in Western European countries tend to get several years of required training, while US cops only get a few months.
The problem in my mind is that this cannot happen as long as most people believe we need a standing army, aka the police, with wideranging discretionary use of force power to protect us from criminals.
Um…the rallying cry of “defund the police” is precisely in opposition to that militarization.
That’s Dusty Smith natch and my apologies. My typing stinks. :-(
@ tallgrass05 :
Democrats or Progressives? You realise that those two are NOT the same group of people or category of political ideology although there is some overlap. Yes, many (most?) progressives may vote reluctantly for Democratic party candidates given the lack of realistic alternatives but most of them are much further towards the compassionate and rational side of politics than the centrist even right wing Democratic party. Which itself is – like most parties – split by factions including some that are barely distinguishable from the Repugliklan party ones whilst other of its factions such as the “Squad” are genuinely progressive.
So are you talking about Democrats, specifically or progressives specifically or liberals or left wingers more broadly? Who exactly are you talking about here?
Liberal also a specific term that may or may not include both progressive and Democrat. Plus as others have already mentioned here, “they” (who?) don’t say that – at least very few if any of them and if “they” do its (usually? almost always?) in the context of history and culture and expanded upon not blanket slogans.
Maher was demonstrated to be a liar and reichwing hack who spews Fox type propaganda in the clip we’re discussing in the OP. Why should we take anything Maher says especially without evidence of it being anything other than his rectally extruded opinion as worth listening to or having any value or credibility at all?
I haven’t bothered to watch the video since Maher’s voice gives me a headache, but when has the guy ever been left? He’s been an American style Libertarian (all of the freedom, none of the responsibility) for decades now.
“End the militarization of the police and cut back on their funding and divert that to resources in education, health care including mental health, social services, and employment so those who need the help can get real help can get it and over-policing of communities doesn’t exacerbate the problems created by systemic racism!” Doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Defund The Police!” when protesting against police violence.
The funny thing is the people who say “don’t use ‘defund’ it turns people off of your message” never provide any alternate phrasing that they think would better get the message across.
Anyway, I remember when Maher used to call himself a libertarian. He’ll always drift toward whatever he thinks will give him maximum smugness and ratings.
Bild @ 42
Forbes is directed to the wealthy, non-crazy segment of conservatives so it makes sense their covid coverage is good.
They vote for Trump while despising him because taxes.
The Tucker Carlson treatment is directed at blue-collar people usually without college education. You know, those who must be made to vote against their own interests.
Ah yes, the slogan “Defund the Police” should have been “Mildly Reduce the Funding of Police Only In So Far As It Limits Militarisation a Bit And Let’s Not Forget That We Should Also Be Talking About Reducing Police Violence, Bias Against Minority Groups — And Don’t Forget to Be Intersectional! — And Prevalence of Fascism Among Officers While Always Being Careful To Speak Respectfully Of Police Who Do Their Job Well Even Though Doing Their Job Well Would Entail Charging Thousands of Fellow Police Officers Every Year, Which They Never Seem To Do, But Let’s Not Discuss That.”
/s
A slogan is a catch-phrase to rally a movement. And sure, slogans can be bad for any number of reasons and can thoroughly deserve criticism. But insisting that a slogan should contain its own evidence and persuasive argumentation and that reading up on the political goals behind it is too much work, well it’s pure lazy privilege. Especially given the importance of and widespread reporting of the events that led to this movement and its slogan.
[topic drift has certainly occurred]
chrislawson:
Hm. The word “defund” is perfectly clear and unambiguous, you know.
So… “Defund the Police” does not actually mean “Defund the Police”, in this case.
In short, it’s at best misleading, and at worst an outright lie.
A smart comedian handles potentially problematic jokes:
“Jokes Seth Myers Can’t Tell: Black History Month, Dolphins Enjoy Lesbian Sex”
https://youtu.be/rF0-ASLax7g
Sure, birgerjohansson.
The fig-leaf that Seth Myers is not actually reciting the jokes, merely sponsoring and promoting and introducing them on his program, makes all the difference.
(Yes, I know… that’s the joke. How smart!)
John, “defund” is not a simple dictionary-definitional term in this context.
Here is the opening para from Wikipedia:
“Defund the police” is a slogan that supports divesting funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full divestment as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services. Activists who support the defunding of police departments often argue that investing in community programs could provide a better crime deterrent for communities; funds would go toward addressing social issues, like poverty, homelessness, and mental disorders. Police abolitionists call for replacing existing police forces with other systems of public safety, like housing, employment, community health, education, and other programs.
From which we can see that (i) it does not mean a simple end to all police funding except to a subset of activists, (ii) that it is not difficult to understand the nuance, to the point where people insisting on an ultra-literal dictionary interpretation are using antagonistic rather than empathetic reasoning. And I’ve yet to see anyone objecting to the word “defund” suggest a better slogan.
There are times when it is important to make malignant and uncooperative agencies fear for their existence if they don’t reform. We can see from history that there has been zero reform within the US police movement despite decades of research, investigations, protests, revelations of secret Chicago torture rooms, prosecutors torpedoing their own grand jury presentations when the defendants are murderers in uniform, failure to arrest whites who murder Blacks or women until it becomes an unsuppressable news scandal, and so on. The biggest driver in improving recent police accountability has nothing to do with internal culture change and everything to do with wide access to video recording on phones. So let them feel scared for once, because appealing to justice, empathy, and reason has failed abysmally. (I’m not suggesting abandoning justice, reason, and empathy, just pointing out that these alone are demonstrably insufficient to drive police reform or we wouldn’t be where we are today. Even if “defund” is nothing more than an effective gambit claim, then more power to it.)
I know there are good, honest police officers workers in the force. I’ve met them. But they are not dominant in police culture and they are not going to be allowed to become dominant in police culture unless the current powers (not just in the police but in politics as well) are more terrified of keeping the status quo than they are of meaningful reform. I’m sure you remember the Fitzgerald Inquiry. That is the kind of existential threat needed.
“Reform the Police!”? Or would that not work in enlighet?
-automatic spelling correction.
Ahem.
Did you not see I wrote “Defund the Police” does not actually mean “Defund the Police”, in this case.”
Rubbish. It very much means that, in ordinary language. And it’s not “nuance”, it’s totally repudiating the meaning of the term.
Really?
Let me fix that for you: “Reform the police”; “Change the police”; “Improve the police”; “Amend the police”; “Reclaim the police”; “Mend the police”. Heh: “Decriminalise the police”.
How could I have missed this one: “Peel the police”.
[Sorry, erik333, did not see your comment before posting mine]
@John Morales
Unfortunately or not, “defund the police” worked far better as a slogan than any of the things you’ve suggested would. This is especially apparent because the police flipped out once it started gaining traction.
I think this is likely because any other method of reform seems doomed to failure. Police unions and ass-covering from responsible administrators will quickly render any enhanced accountability measures you might want to impose into mere formalities. Even appointing/electing reformist police chiefs or prosecutors barely helps. Budget cuts, though, are much harder to weasel out of.
I am not aware of even the most fervent of police abolitionists calling for the police to be defunded immediately. It would by neccessity be a gradual program of removing funding and responsibilities from the existing policing agencies and handing them off to new organizations that don’t have the cultural and structural legacies that the police do.
This is the thing that police fear. They have organically grown into a sort of all-purpose government utility knife. And problem that other branches of government service won’t deal with, the police will..and they’ll claim a.bigger and bigger share of the public purse as their just rewards for that task – even if they’re manifestly incompetent at it.
Society will always have some need for armed state agents who are authorized to use violence in defense of the state, the rule of law, and the safety of other residents. But there is absolutely reason for that agency and those agents to also be, for example, responsible for enforcing traffic laws, conducting criminal investigations, conducting wellness checks on the mentally ill, or teaching children how to ride bikes safely.
Anybody see the episode the week before last? The guests were NYC Congressman Ritchie Torres and Bari Weiss. For some reason, Maher brought up some complaint about the new movie version of West Side Story and asked Congressman Torres, whose only apparent connectionto a movie he hadn’t seen is that he is Puerto Rican, what he thought. You could see from the look on Congressman Torres’s face that he was trying not to say “WTF are you talking about and why are you asking me about this. What am I? The Official Puerto Rican of the Olympic Games?” But as a very slick politician, and I mean that in a good way, he recovered and managed to expose the stupidity of his being asked the question very politely.
Then Maher does a long segment about how Biden and Obama ought to divorce their wives and gay-marry each other to get some swagger back into the White House, in front of two gay guests.
And this is the same idiot who until a couple of months ago had never heard of the black national anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing, and expressed shock and dismay on hearing it, as if it were some new, woke thing.Then he doubled down a week later when his ignorance was exposed.
Naybe four years of too-easy jokes about Trump made him lazy. He just mails it in and isn’t funny anymore.
This is wrong. This is the flaw that most people are operating under. The core idea being presented here is that we need to live in martial law under a standing army to be safe. I reject that notion.
Or perhaps I’m not being charitable enough. In my current ideal, there are armed cops but they are a special small squad that are only called out in response to an active shooter alert. Maybe that’s what you meant.
But I am pretty radical. I don’t think we need persons on the street with radically enhanced police powers to keep us safe. I think that citizens arrest and arrest by paper warrant from a judge (plus a power to issue citations under license) is enough for at least 99% of cases. We need police, aka persons funded by the government to prevent crime and catch criminals, but they don’t need anything remotely like the police powers that they have today. We need police not soldiers. Police are meant to be civilians with a badge, not soldiers under martial law.
This is what we need. We need to radically reclassify what we mean by “police” from “soldiers for law enforcement” to “a civilian, aka a typical person employed as law enforcement”. The fact that we already use the word “civilian” to mean “someone other than a cop” is absolutely horrifying, and it’s indicative of the foundational intellectual problem. We do not need soldiers on the streets to be safe.
Police should be restricted to the same use of force rules as any other person, including rules for a citizen’s arrest, with the following exceptions: the power to issue citations and the accompanying necessary temporary detention powers, and the power to execute warrants from a judge or magistrate, aka a proper official of the judicial branch. Otherwise, they should have no special powers, privileges, rights, or immunities when it comes to using force, threatening force, carrying weapons, using weapons, detentions, arrests, etc. There might need to be some minor exceptions, but if there are such exceptions, they do not occur to me now.
Let me put it even more directly. I would feel safer being arrested by a licensed bounty hunter like “Dog The Bounty Hunter” than a cop. Why? Because I know that Dog has strict rules that he has to follow. I know that he has a paper warrant from a judge. I know that if he violates those strict rules that he has to follow, then his ass is on the line legally, both from civil suit from me, and from criminal charges.
That’s what police used to be circa 1830 in England and America, before they became militarized, before we started giving them (lots of) special use of force powers.
There’s still the remaining problem of lack of police accountability. Here, my policy proposals are even more radical, but they are still grounded in reality, aka the practices of circa 1830 England and America.
1- Eliminate qualified immunity entirely. Without qualified immunity, cops would still enjoy the same absolute immunity defense that any official has for enforcing the law. Qualified immunity exists only to protect cops who would otherwise be civilly liable for “breaking the law”. We had society for hundreds of years without qualified immunity. Qualified immunity was created by boot-licking SCOTUS less than a hundred years ago. We don’t need it. Get rid of it.
2- Bring back the common law right of the victim to press criminal charges against the accused perpetrator. Let the victim have the right to first opportunity to seek an indictment from a grand jury, and to nominate any lawyer of their choosing (or themself) as prosecutor, subject to grand jury vetting. Ever wonder why we have grand juries? Today, grand juries are borderline useless. Historically, grand juries were there to police private prosecutors. Private prosecution was the default method of prosecution for most cases in at least some areas, arguably most areas, in England and American circa 1830. There’s probably other ways to bypass the current corruption and collusion between police and government prosecutors, but they’re really hard to implement in the current political climate without also being corrupted. By contrast, my proposal of private prosecutors is inherently highly resistant to corruption – you would need to corrupt the victim themself, which surely is the most interested party in ensuring that a proper prosecution happens.
Voila. Problem solved. Better training, hiring, and firing practices for police would automatically follow. Not to protect us, but to protect the police themselves.
For more information, see the paper “Are Cops Constitutional?” by Roger Roots, Seton Hall Constitutional L.J. 2001, 685.
https://constitution.org/2-LawRev/roots/cops.htm
Maybe after complaining about “defund the police” we can have an encore of “if it’s about equality why is it called feminism”?
Often some people go out of their way to deliberately mischaracterize slogans in political opposition. It’s common.
One more, sorry. I think Terry Pratchet put it into words better than I can:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Discworld
For those who wish to further discuss the slogan Defund the police!, you may wish to read my recent post here:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pervertjustice/2022/02/02/defund-the-police-guy-fawkes-eve/
GerrardOfTitanServer:
I recall bewilderment at why anyone would send me clips of Maher back during the Obama era, if not earlier. When was he funny?
To #72.
Note: You got the name wrong.
Remember that time Hitchens went in his Maher’s show and called the audience stupid and flipped them off for booing. Good times
“When they say “Math is racist” or “Science is racist” or “Defund the police”, they have a problem even with liberal voters like me. ”
Yes, “they” have a problem with profoundly stupid and dishonest people like you. One of those things is very different from the others, and the “they” who say the first two things are minute subsets of “Democrats, or Progressives, or whatever you want to call them”, which themselves are very different sets.
And If your intention with this otherwise irrelevant comment is to show common cause with Maher, I’m sure he appreciates a show of support from yet another stupid asshole.
Re “math is racist”. This is a thing. One particular group using this particular phrase has a really wrong-headed view of math. The group’s literature says that teaching that there are right and wrong answers in math is racist. This group has some power in California. Thankfully the one place that I know about it happening, it was noticed, people showed up to argue against it, and it was removed from the teaching standards. See:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-leftists-try-to-cancel-math-class-11621355858
As always, there are some cranks on the left who take things too far, but again, AFAIK, this is a relatively fringe position. Still, it’s something that we should keep tabs on so that we can ensure these silly ideas don’t get into classrooms.
PS: Yes, I know that math classrooms can be racist in a myriad of other ways, subtle and not subtle, such as math word problems that use incidental words, items, and other cultural concepts that are more common in white homes vs black homes. However, again, “math is racist” does AFAIK refer to a fringe group which AFAIK does make the outrageous claim that teaching objectivity in math is racist.
” it seems literally incorrect to me.”
Taking a slogan literally is incorrect behavior.
“Simply eliminating law enforcement sounds like a terrible idea.”
Strawman much? A great deal has been written about what “defund” is intended to convey–e.g., reduced militarization, transfer of some functions from armed police to mental health and social workers, etc.–why have you read none of it?
@76 You just cited an opinion piece in the Rupert Murdoch-owned WSJ by Williamson M. “Bill” Evers, a libertarian activist and education researcher who is “a resident scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution”, YOU DOLT.
Jim Balter@77
A slogan that requires a particular response is empirically ineffective. It’s like saying I would laugh at your joke if only I had a sense of humor.
Time will tell whether “defund the police” is an effective way to mobilize this movement. I don’t get to adjudicate it. Neither do you.
To my ears, it sounds a lot like “Defund the NEA”, which while never quite a slogan, was a rallying cry with a clear meaning of removing all public funding so that the National Endowment for the Arts would cease to exist. I mean, people argued either side of this proposition, but did not disagree on the semantics of “defund.”
So pardon me for taking a phrase that follows an identical form and concluding that some may misinterpret it. Or don’t, “pardon” me. That’s up to you if I rendered an unforgivable opinion here. It strikes me as a bad slogan. I will revisit this if, say, 5 years from now it is going strong and functioning the way it’s intended.
And oh lordy, I just read your comment over at CripDyke:
“I don’t like the slogan because I don’t like the goals of those who speak it. They think that we should be striving towards reduction of police force, which itself seems to be a tacit admission that the police are inherently unfixable and will always be uncontrolled murderers, and I don’t like that approach. I want to actually fix the police instead of work off the assumption that the police are inherently unfixable.
But, unfortunately, most people even on the left are unwilling to do what needs to be done, which is to radically re-envision the police as civilians with badges, citizen’s arrest, and paper warrants from judges, aka bounty hunters, instead of soldiers. So, I just think that the the movement is blowing a lot of hot air with highly questionable policies because their foundational assumptions are wrong, e.g. they believe we need to live in a police state to be safe, aka with armed soldiers on the streets under martial law.”
The amount of intellectual dishonesty, strawmanning, and virtue signaling (“I’m a better person on the left than most people on the left”) is massive. Maybe if you actually had a conversation with people in “the movement” you would find that your assumptions about them are nonsense.
@79 “why have you read none of it?”
[Crickets]
” if I rendered an unforgivable opinion here”
Oh you poor thing.
And from the previous comments,
“Then you literally don’t understand the word. “Defund education” is a phrase used to describe the relentless reduction of resources to public universities, secondary schools, and primary schools. Yet we still have those things.”
Etc. So, Paul, you’re reduced to saying that the wording of “Defund the police” is non-optimal, which is, to say the least, not a novel thought. Well, the wording came from the street and caught on because it was short and simple. You’re welcome to offer something better. But you have nothing to say about the substance other than repeated misrepresentations of it.
Jim Balter@81 Oh fuck off. You seem to have missed my point: Clearly, you’re entitled to think whatever you want about me.
But if five years from now, the slogan has gained traction and more support than it has now, I’ll be happy to concede that my judgment was inaccurate. It’s not like it would be the first time.
Jim Balter@82
I am not “reduced”. That was always my point, hence my hedging as the “literal” meaning. I support the movement. I think it’s a dumb slogan and will do harm to the movement.
BTW, your
“By contrast “Black Lives Matters” is a great slogan, means exactly what it says, literally, and the people who bristle at it are certainly unrepentant racists unless they really have serious problems with reading comprehension.”
and someone else’s comment
“But “Black Lives Matter” I’d say is pretty good in that it’s easier to explain and more of a stretch to attack.”
is nonsense … it was immediately attacked with “all lives matter”, “blue lives matter”, etc., and numerous people continue to misinterpret it by taking it to mean “ONLY Black lives matter” … understanding what the slogan means requires understanding its CONTEXT, which was that that people (that is, police) were acting as if Black lives DON’T matter (which is a reason that some people wanted them “defunded”).
But go ahead, be an intellectually dishonest privileged dunderhead if you so choose.
Jim Balter
Sue me. It’s the first hit I found by google. I have looked into this more in the past with other sources, and I’ve read the actual material from this group. They are as ridiculous as I’ve claiming.
…
So, are you ready to bring back the right the common law right to resist unlawful warrantless arrest? Are you ready to bring back the common law right to private criminal prosecution? Are you ready to limit custodial arrest to felony offenses, failure to appear offenses, and arrests made only during an ongoing offense by a personal witness and where the offender has refused an order to cease the offense? Because in my experience, very few people are willing to go that far. Very few people are willing to re-envision police as civilian bounty hunters, as civilians, instead of soldiers.
“But if five years from now, the slogan has gained traction and more support than it has now, I’ll be happy to concede that my judgment was inaccurate. ”
No one gives a fuck about you, your judgments, or your concessions.
Over and out.
Jim Balter@85 People will attack anything, but BLM has so far had a lot more staying power. Also, the misinterpretation is readily countered as a misinterpretation, usually revealing racist assumptions.
Indeed. Note that the success of any movement does not depend on my dunderheadedness or lack thereof. It’ll be cool if the slogan works. More power to you.
” in my experience, very few people are willing to go that far”
Yes, so? Very few people support “defund the police”. Go have a conversation with THEM, and see how they answer your questions.
I’m done with you aholes for today. Bye.
Jim
Wow. I don’t get where the hostility to me is coming from. Sorry for any offense – I didn’t mean it.
A Florida pastor posted this last October:
Turns out, despite what Maher had led him to believe, the pandemic wasn’t actually over for him. Now it is, since COVID killed him – one of around 2,500 people dying from it in the US every day.
SC,
I hate people who think that socialism and freedom are somehow opposed ideals. I hate people who think that “economic freedom” ala libertarianism is something comparable to our other freedoms like free speech, free association, freedom to choose our political leaders, etc. I hate people who think that they owe no duty to other people or society.
PaulBC @88
That has less to do with “Black Lives Matter” being an objectively better slogan than “Defund The Police,” and more to do with the fact that most people, even if they have awful ideas, don’t want to be considered racists. It’s difficult to attack a slogan that says the lives of a group people matter without sounding racist. The best they could do was offer “inclusive” counter slogans (“All Lives”) and those were, rightfully, shot down as irrelevant and deflective.
“Defund The Police” is far easier to attack without sullying yourself. All that is needed is to make the proponents of “DTP” into radicals who want to abolish all police (and prisons too! Oh my!) and see criminals run amuck. It’s like taking candy from a baby. And if you think changing the slogan in some insignificant way will change that, you’re mistaken. It’s just too easy to counter any criticism of the police and make advocates of reform into dangerous radicals.
Walter Solomon@93 Maybe, though I think Black Lives Matters remains an objectively better slogan. Anyway, to be clear, it doesn’t matter what I think. Maybe “Defund the Police” is the best possible slogan for furthering the goals of that movement. Good luck with it. I have been wrong about many things.
Walter Solomon @93
You point to no candy or babies. When I point out the person is incompetently reacting to a slogan and not legislation it’s about the audience too. And I’m absolutely serious.
So what is easy? Because it seemed to be unpleasant to the people I criticized.
PaulBC @94
Perhaps it is an objectively better slogan. If so, It’s likely for the reasons I stated above. It’s hard to counter a slogan that affirms the value of a group of people. It could’ve been, in another context, “Homeless Lives Matter” and it still would’ve been difficult to counter without sounding like a homicidal tyrant.
A slogan that criticizes rather than affirms, is always going to be easier to counter. This is doubly true if it’s criticizing the police since the police are seen as a force for good by a large portion of Americans.
That said, I was probably mistaken about it being impossible to make a slogan criticizing the police counter-proof. I think if you made the police seem racist or dangerous, the slogan could possibly work better. Something along the lines of “Defund The Racist Police” or “Defund Killer Cop (Kops)” might actually work better. Who wants to support corrupt police?
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite @95
Do you not think that there are people out there who are paid to make inconvenient, populous movements seem dangerous and radical? Many of these people, in fact, work for corporate media.
Yes, it was as easy to make “Defund The Police” sound radical and dangerous as it would be to take candy from a baby. I chose the simile for a reason. If you don’t like it, ignore it focus on the wider point I was making about it being difficult to craft a slogan that’s critical of something particularly the police.
@Walter Solomon 97
No candy or babies yet. Maybe you didn’t do much to interfere?
@Walter Solomon
So far I only acknowledge some people can be manipulated by others and slogans aren’t legislation.
Walter Solomon@96 I have no talent for coming up with slogans, so who knows. There are parts of policing that should be defunded and eliminated, such as the purchasing of military weapons. We need a radical restructuring of what we consider to be the job of police in the US and better funding for providers of social services. Both of these are in line, as far as I understand, with DTP as a movement. I can understand how “Defund the Police” expresses frustration about how how police have run amok in the US, but I can also understand why many political candidates don’t want to be associated with it. That includes Bernie Sanders for instance.
A Pew survey showed that actually reducing funding is not very popular, but it was not a poll on the slogan itself. There was an Ipsos poll but I haven’t read carefully enough to see what the question was.
Anecdotally speaking, I live in an affluent, liberal community in the Bay Area. Black Lives Matters signs are very common as well as omnibus lawn signs including less common slogans such as “Water is Life.” We’re “diverse” in the sense of having many Asian immigrants, though the Bay Area has a very small Black population except in specific cities like Oakland. Anyway, “Defund the Police” never caught on around here. That can be explained by privilege, so no real shocker.
Maybe it’s a much better slogan than I think.
@Walter Solomon
The corporate media, other socially insulated perceived authority or source, that’s a part. That part does not exclude the people taking the information to local political interactions from discussion boards to lunch rooms.
I hope my criticism style eventually reaches such people. But I haven’t seen many serious counterpoints to the usefullness of some people choosing criticism with no extra stuff to make it less harsh.
PaulBC @100
I live in Baltimore and it hasn’t caught on around here either. Meanwhile, there are churches and houses that have large “Black Lives Matter” banners.
I think a lot people believe in the thin blue line view that police is the only thing preventing complete chaos. If that’s the case, they’re going to be more “tolerant” of police abuses especially if they’re not the community baring the brunt of the abuse.
In fact, I’ve never heard people, regardless of how impoverished their community is, argue that there should be fewer police. So, that could be where the reluctance to defund comes in as well.
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite @101
Forgive me if I’ve misunderstood you, but I’m certainly not arguing for the criticism to be less harsh. If anything, I’d like it to be more harsh but less general and more focused.
The police certainly deserve all of the criticism they’ve been receiving. Their methods have often been racially biased and needlessly confrontational and deadly. This needs to be called out in clear and direct ways. A debate about defunding vs reforming the police is really just a distraction. Policing needs to change radically ASAP.
@Walter Solomon
What I know is that your 93 doesn’t make media vs. anything else distinctions. Unless I’ve misread it there’s no identification of who is taking candy from babies. I put pressure on non-literal language for a reason.
Walter Solomon@102 I lived in Baltimore for six years in the 90s while going to grad school, and that does not surprise me, definitely the BLM banners (though it didn’t exist at the time) and enough concern about crime not to criticize police directly.
The most puzzling political messaging I remember in Baltimore were posters for Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) with the slogan “Mao more than ever.” I suspect that this did not represent an especially popular line of thinking in the city. I am not sure who was putting those up.
Brony @104
True and that’s because I believe the media deserve the lion share of the blame. I get your point that bad ideas can be discussed on any number of message boards online and then influence local politics — I mean that explains the popularity of QAnon after all — but corporate media, and that includes social media, has an undeniably large influence on the views of vast swaths of the population.
PaulBC @105
I wonder if the Red Emma’s crowd was behind that.
There were definitely some Maoist groups in Baltimore in the 70s. A friend of my mother had such a group move into her apartment and take over for awhile until my mom helped her kick them out. They would paint Maoist graffiti on private and public property.
As you said, their views aren’t representative, at all, of the views of most of the people here.
@Walter Solomon
Go back and look. That stuff about denying, or me not thinking the media has a role is yours.
@Brony
I think we’re just talking past each other now.
My question was partly based on my impression that you were downplaying the corporate media’s role in smearing DTP and how easily they did it and partly based on me not entirely understanding your point.
It wasn’t my intent to accuse you of denying the media’s role here. If anything my confusion was that I knew you were critical of my post but couldn’t pinpoint what, exactly, you took issue with in what I wrote.
@PaulBC, 94:
I think you’ve got an excluded middle here.
I certainly don’t think “Defund the Police” is the “best possible” slogan. If I’d been invited to the brainstorming session, I would certainly have tossed in at least half a dozen suggestions that I think would have been better. It’s taking an act of will not to list some here.
But while “Defund the Police” is probably not the best slogan, I don’t think that any hypothetical alternative could be so much better that it would have made an iota of practical difference. That’s the point I was making up thread: the structural forces against real police reform are very, very strong. Don’t put so much faith in magic words. That’s not what’s going to fix things. It’s going to take lots of organizing and advocacy. And patience.
The bottom line is I wasn’t invited to the brainstorming session. Neither were you. And “Defund the Police” is the slogan we have. At this point, questioning and undermining it at every turn (rather than simply explaining and advocating for the underlying principles) only helps the other side.
@Walter Solomon 109
Quote me impressing my downplaying then.
I don’t see you mentioning anyone specific in 93 having an easy time, and the people I challenge aren’t having an easy time. It looks like you left the category of it being easy completely open.
You can be interested in the media all you want but I still don’t see a reason to think you were making such distinctions.
jack lecou@110 Well, I certainly wasn’t intending on undermining it, let alone doing so at at every turn. My comment in @16 was supposed to be an aside in a longer comment about the two phrases that are not even real slogans, the aside being: yes, “Defund the Police” is a slogan and I get why the wording is perceived as problematic. (Maybe I should have said that.)
I agree that I presented a false dichotomy with the phrase “best possible.” I wrote sloppily.
I honestly don’t have a lot of optimism about police reform of any kind right at the moment. The window of opportunity (if there was one) seems like it’s slipping away. And yes, there are no magic words that will make much of a difference.
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite @111
I’m not sure what you’re going on about now to be honest. What, exactly, was your issue with my OP? I thought I was pretty clear with everything I wrote. Certainly PaulBC, who I was replying to, understood me clearly enough even if he disagreed with me.
To be clear, I said the corporate media had an easy time smearing DTP. If you disagree with this, that’s fine. We have differing views on how the media handled DTP it seems. There really isn’t anything else to discuss.
@92. GerrardOfTitanServer
Dunno about the hate people part but that’s an excellent point in my view FWIW.
Specifically
Being socialist does NOT contradict having freedom.
Think that bears repeating and noting for truth.
StevoR
Yea. “Hate” is a strong word.
@Walter Solomon 113
Clear?
You made an assertion about things being easy with respect to mischaracterizing a slogan. Your OP is general. When I asked you to back your non-literal candy and baby shit up you started going on about me denying stuff when I pointed out that it’s not easy in A context.
You are an example of the oversensitivity I mentioned in 28.
When you make such general pronouncements and start making accusations when challenged on your basic assumptions you aren’t looking good for any discussion.
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite
I wasn’t looking to have any discussion with you in the first place. My comment was to PaulBC. Everything you’ve written to me has been largely incoherent. I can understand why John Morales was exasperated with you in the other thread. Maybe you should take that as a sign that, perhaps, you’re not as clear as you believe you are and tend to misinterpret other’s statements.
Finally, I don’t have to back up shit. It was my opinion and I explained it clearly. If you disagreed with me, you could have ignored my comment and kept it moving or simply explained why you disagreed. That’s all I have to say on the matter.
@Walter Solomon
Bye bye.
Wow. Nerves struck. Couple things.
I have always thought that Maher identified as “Libertarian,” a term I increasingly think is the PC term for sociopath, but I digress.
I don’t know how things work in the rest of the country, but where I am beauticians require longer training and must be licensed by the state. There don’t seem to be any such requirements for police, yet we expect them to perform a whole range of social services that frankly they don’t seem qualified to provide. If we want them to provide those services then we should require more extensive of training in those areas.
As for “defund the police,” it’s a really stupid phrase which gives ammunition to people with malevolent intent. We need law enforcement, we should ask ourselves what should be expected of them and tailor the role to that function.